Austin Palmer-Smith, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1999
Landscape of Bend in Yellowstone River painted minutes earlier by, Brian David Kauppi

First recognition of the age of earth became visibly apparent on a road trip in the west. They packed the van with more canvas than clothes, tubes of paint, turpentine and cans of baked beans. They bathed in rivers and lakes and the Pacific Ocean, wearing the same clothes for two months, sleeping in the van or camping in the parks.
The pock marked face of the desert, the fossil fields where dinosaur bones had been excavated passed by the van's windows baking in summer's broad sunlight. Their ghosts retraced their giant steps through the landscape on the scale of the standing buttes monumental and flashing before their eyes. The speed of the van was lost in a stretch of smooth desert road so long and straight it went beyond conceivable proportion and scale. The distances travelled, the masses of mountains they passed by and through were difficult to appreciate and the quality of road was automatically taken for granted. Herds of wild animals like indian tribes near extinction trudging over hills and through forests pursued, afraid and interdependent, they too had a language and society, an ancient gypsy culture, a caste system and similarly treated their members and outcasts. The adoration and protection of a calf walks between the legs of its strongest family members, the shame and dismissal of the old and weak fall behind the pack and are devoured, the crazy bull is left to his own madness in a thicket, the long grass mashed down from his naps into a huge round bed of dust. Their smells lingered in the landscape and spoke of their plight and suffering. Their grunts could be heard traveling on the winds across miles of flat plains as if they were whispering in his ears the secrets of their traditions and the ancient history of their evolution. So coyotes really do howl at the full moon...